Acknowledgements

Thanks to Mike Michael for his comments on the chapter and to Catherine Pitt for helping me to understand the mechanics of rail track fatigue. Thanks above all to David Owen for his extensive comments and contribution to the argument.

Notes

1 cf.

2 See the collection of papers on the US presidential election brought together in the June 2001 issue of Social Studies of Science. As Mike Lynch notes, the media coverage of the election drew attention to the “local contingencies associated with the politico­techniques of voting and vote counting” (Lynch 2001: 417).

3 See, for example, Butler, Laclau and Zizek (2000).

4 A sense of the specificity of politics as a practice and an experience is suggested in the work of Michael Oakeshott in his criticism of rationalist accounts of politics (Oakeshott, 1962) in his criticism of rationalist accounts of politics.

5 cf. Barry et al. (1995).

6 Political theorists have tended to want to place emphasis on one side of this equation or the other. See, for example, the different perspectives on the political collected together by Seyla Benhabib (1996). Political theorists are divided over the question of whether the goal of politics should be the end of politics or its continuation. Should politics lead to consensus and agreement or should it, as Bonnie Honig argues, “affirm the inescapability of conflict and the ineradicability of resistance” (Honig 1996: 258).

7 My thanks to David Owen for both the argument and the reference to Waldron's work.

8 Although see Bonnie Honig (1993) on the association of the dominant tradition of political theory with the justification of anti-politics.

9 Hannah Arendt (1964) argued that a social and economic justification for the anti­politics of administration and management historically subverted and displaced the value of democratic freedom.

10 For an expansion of the notion of the collective that includes non-humans as well as humans see Latour (1999b: 351). Latour draws here on the philosophy of AN Whitehead (1929, 1985).

11 cf. Latour (1999a: 186).

12 The development of metrology in natural science and engineering on a large scale is a nineteenth-century phenomenon. On the history of metrology see, in particular, the essays collected in Wise (1995). In the advanced industrial countries, metrological work is a major recipient of public money. Institutions involved include the National Bureau of Standards in the USA, the National Physical Laboratory and the Laboratory of the Government Chemist in the UK, and numerous international organisations.

13 In the UK this has taken the form of public information campaigns on such matters as air pollution, the possible effects of the use of mobile phones on children, domestic insulation, vaccination and AIDS. The relation of experts to the public has shifted from one in which the public are primarily addressed as uninformed to one in which they are addressed as individuals who require and demand information in order to make choices (Rose 1999; Barry 2001, chapters 6 and 7).

14 On the history of metrological regimes see the essays collected in Wise (1995). A metrological regime is a zone in which measurement has come to take relatively standardised forms.

15 As the example of the garage mechanic suggests, many of the elements of such metrological regimes are to be found in the private sector. Indeed, it is a feature of contemporary forms of government that the state increasingly delegates responsibility for measurement activities to other agencies (Barry 2001).

16 See Slater (this volume) for further analysis of this point.

17 Interviews, London, 1996-7.

18 Penn et al. (1996).

19 Testing procedures are quite different in different countries. In Germany, for example, testing is not delegated to private garages that may be unreliable and poorly equipped.

Rather than the relatively unstandardised observations of individual professionals and laypersons, for example (Osborne 1992).

On the lack of reversibility of techno-economic arrangements and the association between irreversibilisation and standardisation see Callon (1991: 151).

See, for example, Hickman and McCrae (1995) and Sadler (1996).

An excellent review of the literature on the BSE crisis is given by Seguin (2000). On the precautionary principle see Dratwa (2000).

http://www.serco.com/uk/au_009.htm, my emphasis. The policy of establishing government research and development institutions as either privatised or autonomous agencies developed under the conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s. However, the idea that government laboratories should “sell” their advice to government has a much longer history. As early as 1972 Lord Rothschild established the so-called customer-contractor principle for government science (Department of Industry 1972). However, a much more significant shift occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s when most government laboratories (with the exception of defence research laboratories) became agencies and were run by private companies. The National Physical Laboratory was semi-privatised in 1995 and is now operated on behalf of the Department of Trade and Industry by NPL Management Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Serco (www.npl.co.uk).

Interviews, Transport Research Laboratory 1996.

In Britain see, in particular, House of Lords (2000). “A meaningful response to the need for more or better dialogue between the public and science in the United Kingdom requires us to go beyond event-based initiatives like consensus conferences or citizens' juries.

Particularly following the work of Ulrich Beck (1992, 1995).

Callon (this volume). Such demands have not just come from social movements and activists. In response to the outbreak of Foot-and-Mouth disease in pigs, sheep and cattle in the UK in February 2001, Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke of the “arm­lock” which the major supermarkets had over “you people” (the farmers). “Blair woos farmers in price ‘arm lock'”, Guardian, 2 March 2001, “Law to break supermarkets' grip on farmers”, Observer, 4 March 2001.

Paul Virilio (2000) notes that the history of the technological invention is also a history of technological accidents.

First HSE interim report, cited in House of Commons (2000).

“Why an accident like Hatfield was waiting to happen”, Financial Times, 22 February 2001. Ulrich Beck has argued that technological hazards are a manifestation of social imperfection. “It is not something external but itself that society encounters in the hazards that convulse it, and the reigning paralysis can only be overcome in so far as society apprehends the hazards as signposts to its own history and its own corrigibility” (Beck 1995: 159).

Interview with Catherine Pitt, Cambridge, February 2001. According to her: “These studies did not include a range of track conditions, and so the effects of varying axle load and train speed cannot be examined. Only heavy haul lines were investigated: the wear situation may be quite different on high speed lines. There is also the fact that real rails experience a much larger range of environmental conditions than steels in wear tests. There is the possibility of quite large temperature variations, contamination of the rail surface by dirt and dead leaves, and lubrication by rain or snow” (Pitt 2000: 25).

34 Railtrack response to Select Committee report, 14 December 2000, http:// www.railtrack.co.uk/corporate/noticeboard/article.cfm

35 In this context, I take mechanical engineering and metallurgy to refer not just to academic disciplines but to an array of specific technical practices with which they are associated.

36 Following the Hatfield crash the Labour government were unable to follow through with their plan to privatise UK air-traffic control operations. The government were also forced to compromise over their plan to privatise the London Underground in the face of opposition from the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, and the Chief Executive of London Underground, Bob Kiley.

37 In Whitehead’s analysis the notion of the “stubborn fact” refers to the capacity of arrangements of social and natural entities (“organisms”) to set limits on possible events: “The macroscopic meaning [of the organism] is concerned with the givenness of the actual world, considered as a stubborn fact which at once limits and provides opportunity for the actual occasion” (Whitehead 1978: 129).

38 Even if they are revealed. Although the funding of political parties or radical organisa­tions is often apparent, this does not mean that it is easy to establish a connection between economic interests and political positions and activities.

39 Consider, for example, the scandals and events associated with the names of Helmut Kohl, Peter Mandelson, Edith Cresson, Neil Hamilton, Bill Clinton amongst others. On the history of political scandal see Thompson (2000).

40 See, in particular, Power (1997), Rose (1999) and Strathern (2000).

41 In the European Commission all research and development programmes were formally evaluated. However, those involved in commissioning evaluation were acutely aware of the need to control the production and circulation of evaluation reports (Barry and Rose 1995).

42 The development of effective institutional forms of anti-politics long predates the development of the audit culture. While the recent critical interest in the emergence of the “audit culture” is important, there is a real danger of romanticising the regime which preceded it.

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